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Pulling back the curtains on wage-theft enforcement in MN; Trump's latest attack is on RFK, Jr; NM LGBTQ+ equality group endorses 2024 'Rock Star' candidates; Michigan's youth justice reforms: Expanded diversion, no fees.

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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says rebuilding Baltimore's Key Bridge will be challenging and expensive. An Alabama Democrat flips a state legislature seat and former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman dies at 82.

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Historic wildfires could create housing and health issues for rural Texans, a Kentucky program helps prison parolees start a new life, and descendants of Nicodemus, Kansas celebrate the Black settlers who journeyed across the 1870s plains seeking self-governance.

2008 Sets WI Campaign Spending Record

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Monday, January 5, 2009   

Madison, WI - Running for a State Assembly seat is not an inexpensive proposition in Wisconsin anymore. The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign (WDC) says in 2008, for the first time ever, more than $1 million was spent on a single State Assembly race. And the economic downturn does appear to faze some groups with political axes to grind, according to WDC Director Mike McCabe.

"The economy's tanked, the stock market crashed, money's tight, but it doesn't seem to affect the biggest campaign donors at all."

Among the findings in the WDC's year-end report, the race for the open 47th District seat in Central Wisconsin attracted 10 special interest groups that spent more than $1 million on broadcast ads and mailings. In McCabe's view, that kind of spending on local races drowns out the voices of average citizens.

"Special interest groups who are trying to own our legislature pumped over $7 million into state legislative races, which was easily a record - almost a half-million dollars more than we had seen in the past."

Those who oppose limits on campaign finance say the dollars represent constitutionally-protected speech; McCabe disagrees.

"When money is speech, then those people who have truckloads of money do all the talking. And what it does to the free speech rights of everybody else is devastating."

The report notes that, in the 2008 legislative races, labor and conservative ideological groups spent an estimated $7.1 million, mostly on negative advertising, mailings and telephone calls designed to "smear" certain candidates and influence voters to reject them. Spending by groups outside the state also surpassed the previous record of $6.65 million, set in the 2004 legislative contests.



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